[conspire] how do I move my .mozilla directory and all the mailcontents to an external drive

[freepalestin at dslextreme.com]

David Fox
> On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 6:11 PM,  <freepalestin at dslextreme.com> wrote:
>> I use Seamonkey for my browser and email. I request no flaming.
>>  I want to move the .mozilla directory to an external drive and have
>> access
>
> Darlene, I think you're on the right track, but let's make sure of a
> couple of things first.
>
> 1) This external drive - are the permissions of the mounted directory
> (i.e., /mnt/whereever) sufficient to let an ordinary user go inside
> the directory and browse the files?
>
> 2) What about the ownership/permissions on the mounted drive? If you
> just copy the files over, permissions should be maintained if you do
> the copy command right.
>
>

The permissions seem to be correct.

>>  How do I move my .mozilla directory and all the mail contents
>>  to an external drive and still have access to all my email
>>  accounts and the email in them?
>
> A symbolic link (ln) should help, since that will have seamonkey (or
> any program, realy, see that the .mozilla in /new/path should be used
> (i.e., follow the links) to put your files on the new location.
>
> One thing you can't do (and shouldn't be an issue, but I'll bring it
> up) is that you can't hard link directories or files on one filesystem
> to a file on another filesystem.

The symlink is not working.
I did the following
mv .mozilla /new/path
cd ~
ln -s /new/path/.mozilla ./

[snip]

Then I tried creating a .mozilla directory in my home directory and
copying some of the files to the .mozilla in my home directory from the
/new/path/.mozilla that I thought might be needed e.g. prefs.js,
msgFilterRules.dat. Then I tried symlinks to the files in the Mail
directory. That didn't work either. Maybe I need to understand what is in
the .msf files and do something with them.

Right now I am not downloading mail to my computer. I'm accessing my mail
from dslextreme.

Seamonkey seems to want to have the .mozilla directory and all the files
under it in the home directory. There is probably something I'm not
understanding - I obviously have not figured it out yet.

I sure want to have access to all of my email that I had previously
downloaded. I also want to have my email downloaded onto my external
drive. So I certainly look forward to getting this all to work.

Thank you,

Darlene Wallach


That didn't work either